History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 19 - Vol. 01, Ch. 03: The Legendary History of Egypt, pt. 3

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Griffith.

The three talismans here represented are two crowns, each in a naos, and the burning fiery uræus.

Were there ever duller legends and a more senile phantasy!

They did not spring spontaneously from the lips of the people, but were composed at leisure by priests desirous of enhancing the antiquity of their cult, and augmenting the veneration of its adherents in order to increase its importance.

Each city wished it to be understood that its feudal sanctuary was founded upon the very day of creation, that its privileges had been extended or confirmed during the course of the first divine dynasty, and that these pretensions were supported by the presence of objects in its treasury which had belonged to the oldest of the king-gods.

Such was the origin of tales in which the personage of the beneficent Pharaoh is often depicted in ridiculous fashion.

Did we possess all the sacred archives, we should frequently find them quoting as authentic history more than one document as artificial as the chronicle of Aît-nobsû.

When we come to the later members of the Ennead, there is a change in the character and in the form of these tales.

Doubtless Osiris and Sît did not escape unscathed out of the hands of the theologians; but even if sacerdotal interference spoiled the legend concerning them, it did not altogether disfigure it.

Here and there in it is still noticeable a sincerity of feeling and liveliness of imagination such as are never found in those of Shû and of Sibû.

This arises from the fact that the functions of these gods left them strangers, or all but strangers, to the current affairs of the world.

Shû was the stay, Sibû the material foundation of the world; and so long as the one bore the weight of the firmament without bending, and the other continued to suffer the tread of human generations upon his back, the devout took no more thought of them than they themselves took thought of the devout.

The life of Osiris, on the other hand, was intimately mingled with that of the Egyptians, and his most trivial actions immediately reacted upon their fortunes.

They followed the movements of his waters; they noted the turning-points in his struggles against drought; they registered his yearly decline, yearly compensated by his aggressive returns and his intermittent victories over Typhon;

his proceedings and his character were the subject of their minute study.

If his waters almost invariably rose upon the appointed day and extended over the black earth of the valley, this was no mechanical function of a being to whom the consequences of his conduct are indifferent; he acted upon reflection, and in full consciousness of the service that he rendered.

He knew that by spreading the inundation he prevented the triumph of the desert; he was life, he was goodness--_Onnofriû_--and Isis, as the partner of his labours, became like him the type of perfect goodness.

But while Osiris developed for the better, Sit was transformed for the worse, and increased in wickedness as his brother gained in purity and moral elevation.

In proportion as the person of Sît grew more defined, and stood out more clearly, the evil within him contrasted more markedly with the innate goodness of Osiris, and what had been at first an instinctive struggle between two beings somewhat vaguely defined--the desert and the Nile, water and drought--was changed into conscious and deadly enmity.

No longer the conflict of two elements, it was war between two gods; one labouring to produce abundance, while the other strove to do away with it; one being all goodness and life, while the other was evil and death incarnate.

A very ancient legend narrates that the birth of Osiris and his brothers took place during the five additional days at the end of the year; a subsequent legend explained how Nûît and Sibû had contracted marriage against the express wish of Râ, and without his knowledge.

When he became aware of it he fell into a violent rage, and cast a spell over the goddess to prevent her giving birth to her children in any month of any year whatever.

But Thot took pity upon her, and playing at draughts with the moon won from it in several games one seventy-second part of its fires, out of which he made five whole days; and as these were not included in the ordinary calendar, Nûît could then bring forth her five children, one after another: Osiris, Haroêris, Sit, Isis, and Nephthys.

Osiris was beautiful of face, but with a dull and black complexion; his height exceeded five and a half yards.

[*] * As a matter of fact, Osiris is often represented with black or green hands and face, as is customary for gods of the dead; it was probably this peculiarity which suggested the popular idea of his black complexion.

A magic papyrus of Ramesside times fixes the stature of the god at seven cubits, and a phrase in a Ptolemaic inscription places it at eight cubits, six palms, three fingers.

He was born at Thebes, in the first of the additional days, and straightway a mysterious voice announced that the lord of all--_nibû-r-zarû_--had appeared.

The good news was hailed with shouts of joy, followed by tears and lamentations when it became known with what evils he was menaced.

[*] The echo reached Râ in his far-off dwelling, and his heart rejoiced, notwithstanding the curse which he had laid upon Nûît. He commanded the presence of his great-grandchild in Xoïs, and unhesitatingly acknowledged him as the heir to his throne.

Osiris had married his sister Isis, even, so it was said, while both of them were still within their mother's womb;[**] and when he became king he made her queen regent and the partner of all his undertakings.

* One variant of the legend told that a certain Pamylis of Thebes having gone to draw water had heard a voice proceeding from the temple of Zeus, which ordered him to proclaim aloud to the world the birth of the great king, the beneficent Osiris.

He had received the child from the hands of Kronos, brought it up to youth, and to him the Egyptians had consecrated the feast of Pamylies, which resembled the Phallophoros festival of the Greeks.

** _De Iside et Osiride_, Leemans' edition, § 12, pp. 20, 21. Haroêris, the Apollo of the Greeks, was supposed to be the issue of a marriage consummated before the birth of his parents while they were still within the womb of their mother Rhea-Nûît. This was a way of connecting the personage of Haroêris with the Osirian myths by confounding him with the homonymous Harsiêsis, the son of Isis, who became the son of Osiris through his mother's marriage with that god.

The Egyptians were as yet but half civilized; they were cannibals, and though occasionally they lived upon the fruits of the earth, they did not know how to cultivate them.

Osiris taught them the art of making agricultural implements--the plough and the hoe,--field labour, the rotation of crops, the harvesting of wheat and barley,[*] and vine culture.

* Diodoeus even ascribes to him the discovery of barley and of wheat; this is consequent upon the identification of Isis with Demeter by the Greeks.

According to the historian, Leo of Pella, the goddess twined herself a crown of ripe ears and placed it upon her head one day when she was sacrificing to her parents.

Isis weaned them from cannibalism, healed their diseases by means of medicine or of magic, united women to men in legitimate marriage, and showed them how to grind grain between two flat stones and to prepare bread for the household.

She invented the loom with the help of her sister Nephthys, and was the first to weave and bleach linen.

There was no worship of the gods before Osiris established it, appointed the offerings, regulated the order of ceremonies, and composed the texts and melodies of the liturgies.

He built cities, among them Thebes itself, according to some; though others declared that he was born there.

As he had been the model of a just and pacific king, so did he desire to be that of a victorious conqueror of nations; and, placing the regency in the hands of Isis, he went forth to war against Asia, accompanied by Thot the ibis and the jackal Anubis.

He made little or no use of force and arms, but he attacked men by gentleness and persuasion, softened them with songs in which voices were accompanied by instruments, and taught them also the arts which he had made known to the Egyptians.

No country escaped his beneficent action, and he did not return to the banks of the Nile until he had traversed and civilized the world from one horizon to the other.

Sît-Typhon was red-haired and white-skinned, of violent, gloomy, and jealous temper.

[*] Secretly he aspired to the crown, and nothing but the vigilance of Isis had kept him from rebellion during the absence of his brother.

The rejoicings which celebrated the king's return to Memphis provided Sit with his opportunity for seizing the throne.

* The colour of his hair was compared with that of a red- haired ass, and on that account the ass was sacred to him.

As to his violent and jealous disposition, see the opinion of Diodorus Siculus, book i. 21, and the picture drawn by Synesius in his pamphlet Ægyptius.

It was told how he tore his mother's bowels at birth, and made his own way into the world through her side.

[Illustration: 250. jpg THE OSMIAN TRIAD HOKUS.

OSIRIS, ISIS.

2] 2 Drawing by Boudier of the gold group in the Louvre Museum.

The drawing is made from a photograph which belonged to M. de Witte, before the monument was acquired by E. de Rougé in 1871. The little square pillar of lapis-lazuli, upon which Osiris squats, is wrongly set up, and the names and titles of King Osorkon, the dedicator of the triad, are placed upside down.

He invited Osiris to a banquet along with seventy-two officers whose support he had ensured, made a wooden chest of cunning workmanship and ordered that it should be brought in to him, in the midst of the feast.

As all admired its beauty, he sportively promised to present it to any one among the guests whom it should exactly fit.

All of them tried it, one after another, and all unsuccessfully; but when Osiris lay down within it, immediately the conspirators shut to the lid, nailed it firmly down, soldered it together with melted lead, and then threw it into the Tanitic branch of the Nile, which carried it to the sea.

The news of the crime spread terror on all sides.

The gods friendly to Osiris feared the fate of their master, and hid themselves within the bodies of animals to escape the malignity of the new king.

Isis cut off her hair, rent her garments, and set out in search of the chest.

She found it aground near the mouth of the river[*] under the shadow of a gigantic acacia, deposited it in a secluded place where no one ever came, and then took refuge in Bûto, her own domain and her native city, whose marshes protected her from the designs of Typhon even as in historic times they protected more than one Pharaoh from the attacks of his enemies.

There she gave birth to the young Horus, nursed and reared him in secret among the reeds, far from the machinations of the wicked one.

[**] * At this point the legend of the Saïte and Greek period interpolates a whole chapter, telling how the chest was carried out to sea and cast upon the Phoenician coast near to Byblos.

The acacia, a kind of heather or broom in this case, grew up enclosing the chest within its trunk.

This addition to the primitive legend must date from the XVIIIth to the XXth dynasties, when Egypt had extensive relations with the peoples of Asia.

No trace of it whatever has hitherto been found upon Egyptian monuments strictly so called; not even on the latest.

** The opening illustration of this chapter (p. 221) is taken from a monument at Phihe, and depicts Isis among the reeds.

The representation of the goddess as squatting upon a mat probably gave rise to the legend of the floating isle of Khemmis, which HECATÆUS of Miletus had seen upon the lake of Bûto, but whose existence was denied by Herodotus notwithstanding the testimony of Hecatæus.

But it happened that Sît, when hunting by moonlight, caught sight of the chest, opened it, and recognizing the corpse, cut it up into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad at random.

Once more Isis set forth on her woeful pilgrimage.

She recovered all the parts of the body excepting one only, which the oxyrhynchus had greedily devoured;[*] and with the help of her sister Nephthys, her son Horus, Anubis, and Thot, she joined together and embalmed them, and made of this collection of his remains an imperishable mummy, capable of sustaining for ever the soul of a god.

On his coming of age, Horus called together all that were left of the loyal Egyptians and formed them into an army.

[**] * This part of the legend was so thoroughly well known, that by the time of the XIXth dynasty it suggested incidents in popular literature.

When Bitiû, the hero of _The Tale of the Two Brothers_, mutilated himself to avoid the suspicion of adultery, he cast his bleeding member into the water, and _the Oxyrhynchus devoured it_.

** Towards the Grecian period there was here interpolated an account of how Osiris had returned from the world of the dead to arm his son and train him to fight.

According to this tale he had asked Horus which of all animals seemed to him most useful in time of war, and Horus chose the horse rather than the lion, because the lion avails for the weak or cowardly in need of help, whereas the horse is used for the pursuit and destruction of the enemy.

Judging from this reply that Horus was ready to dare all, Osiris allowed him to enter upon the war.

The mention of the horse affords sufficient proof that this episode is of comparatively late origin (cf.

p. 41 for the date at which the horse was acclimatized in Egypt).

His "Followers"--_Shosûû Horû_--defeated the "Accomplices of Sît"--_Samiu Sît_--who were now driven in their turn to transform themselves into gazelles, crocodiles and serpents,--animals which were henceforth regarded as unclean and Typhonian.

For three days the two chiefs had fought together under the forms of men and of hippopotami, when Isis, apprehensive as to the issue of the duel, determined to bring it to an end.

"Lo!

she caused chains to descend upon them, and made them to drop upon Horus.

Thereupon Horus prayed aloud, saying: 'I am thy son Horus!'

Then Isis spake unto the fetters, saying; 'Break, and unloose yourselves from my son Horus!'

She made other fetters to descend, and let them fall upon her brother Sit.

Forthwith he lifted up his voice and cried out in pain, and she spake unto the fetters and said unto them: 'Break!'

Yea, when Sît prayed unto her many times, saying: 'Wilt thou not have pity upon the brother of thy son's mother?'

then her heart was filled with compassion, and she cried to the fetters: 'Break, for he is my eldest brother!'

and the fetters unloosed themselves from him, and the two foes again stood face to face like two men who will not come to terms."

Horus, furious at seeing his mother deprive him of his prey, turned upon her like a panther of the South.

She fled before him on that day when battle was waged with Sît the Violent, and he cut off her head.

But Thot transformed her by his enchantments and made a cow's head for her, thereby identifying her with her companion, Hâthor.

[Illustration: 253. jpg ISIS-HATHOR, COW-HEADED.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze statuette of Saïte period in the Gîzeh Museum (Mariette, _Album photographique du musée de Boulaq_, pl.

5, No. 167).

The war went on, with all its fluctuating fortunes, till the gods at length decided to summon both rivals before their tribunal.

According to a very ancient tradition, the combatants chose the ruler of a neighbouring city, Thot, lord of Hermopolis Parva, as the arbitrator of their quarrel.

Sît was the first to plead, and he maintained that Horus was not the son of Osiris, but a bastard, whom Isis haô conceived after the death of her husband.

Horua triumphantly vindicated the legitimacy of his birth; and Thot condemned Sît to restore, according to some, the whole of the inheritance which he had wrongly retained,--according to others, part of it only.

The gods ratified the sentence, and awarded to the arbitrator the title of _Ûapirahûhûi_: he who judges between two parties.

A legend of more recent origin, and circulated after the worship of Osiris had spread over all Egypt, affirmed that the case had remained within the jurisdiction of Sibû, who was father to the one, and grandfather to the other party.

Sibû, however, had pronounced the same judgment as Thot, and divided the kingdom into halves--_poshûi_; Sît retained the valley from the neighbourhood of Memphis to the first cataract, while Horus entered into possession of the Delta.

Egypt henceforth consisted of two distinct kingdoms, of which one, that of the North, recognized Horus, the son of Isis, as its patron deity; and the other, that of the South, placed itself under the protection of Sît Nûbîti, the god of Ombos.

[*] * Another form of the legend gives the 27th Athyr as the date of the judgment, assigning Egypt to Horus, and to Sît Nubia, or _Doshirît_, the red land.

It must have arisen towards the age of the XVIIIth dynasty, at a time when their piety no longer allowed the devout to admit that the murderer of Osiris could be the legitimate patron of half the country.

So _the half_ belonging to Sît was then placed either in Nubia or in the western desert, which had, indeed, been reckoned as his domain from earliest times.